I’m voting for Merkley, but oh my god. Did he really just say that? Talking about “oil sheiks” would be like saying we’re held hostage by “media rabbis” or something, in that it’s both hateful and inaccurate. The biggest exporter of crude oil to the US (as of 2007) is Canada, followed by Saudi Arabia, then Mexico, then Venezuela, then Nigeria. I wonder if we’ll start hearing about the “Canucks of crude” or the “petroleum padres” any time soon. 20% of our oil is from the Persian Gulf, so it’s true that our oil is disproportionately Middle Eastern, but it’s nowhere near overwhelming.

I’m all for energy independence, I’d just rather not see the “scary Arab” trotted out to sell the policy. (The “scary speculators” thing is similar, though speculators probably aren’t in danger of having their houses firebombed.) Fighting the oil addiction means a change in us, not just railing at those around us.

With Merkley joining him in the Senate Wyden said Oregon would benefit, predicting that the state would “become the Saudia Arabia of renewables.”

I have no doubt about that. 20 years ago Oregon was a state reeling from restrictions on logging (which I should note are, in part, so that the industry doesn’t simply log itself out and put itself out of business), but we invested in high-tech industry and we’re now home to an Intel campus and to Linux creator Linus Torvalds. However, with Abu Dhabi (in Saudi Arabia’s neighbor, the United Arab Emirates) investing in clean energy from the bundle they’ve made in dirty energy, we may want to hurry before Saudi Arabia because the Saudi Arabia of renewables.